Polling is broken. Random sampling is gone. People lie. People self-select. People self-deselect.

Pollsters try to adjust for demographics, but they fail.

Political scientists?

Most of us do not have enough of a sense of the breadth of the populace to have been able to expect a massive Trump win like this. If we thought we did, we’re clearly deluded.

Politically, many citizens appear to be invisible, thus disposable. The sheer volume of support for Trump, winning the popular vote [as of 12:45am, Vancouver time] as well as the Electoral College vote, indicates that we are not paying attention to millions of disenfranchised people.

But there are different groups of disenfranchisement.

Old people, white people, male people are trying to hold on to their male and white entitlements. They are part of a massive backlash. They have spoken. And they had the numbers for Trump and Pence to win.

Women, people of colour, immigrants, Muslims, in their own independent and intersectional ways, have been clearly disenfranchised and attacked for generations. Yet Clinton was not a sufficiently engaging candidate to be their champion.

This election was a race and gender war: “white supremacy’s last stand.” See below.

I cannot see a valid or effective role for pollsters in the near future. They were so wrong about the last BC election, the last 2 Alberta elections, the last 2 US presidential elections, the last Canadian election, and Brexit.

Political scientists will need to look beyond their traditional demographics to really understand the breadth and variety of issues. Danielle Moodie-Mills said on CBC last night that the Democratic Party only really talks to marginalized groups when it’s time to vote. MANY progressive political parties are guilty of this too. Political scientists as well. We need to pay attention to voices we’ve ignored or discounted in the past. They were pivotal in this election.

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